rainbows

Hey sis and hey Oliver of the Sky-you guys! YOu are cuute!
Photograph by John Harte for exhibition coming up in Osaka :-)

good morning

Good Morning! The week has been kind of frenetic.

We received notice from Finders Keeper's preparing us for lots of people at the show in two weeks.

Carly and I have been working on our own orders as well as packing for the market in Sydney. Our new colours are in- phew, the past few weeks has been a comedy of errors I don't wish to live through again. At least now we can get on with one of the new products we have in mind to take with us to Finder's Keepers but it requires some thought so hopefully we have enough time.

Danielle and her newly husband (congratulations!) came for a visit to Nest Studio; it was really nice to meet a textile designer from WA with similar interests and passion :-)

G had her first kindie performance; my car's muffler fell out WHILST driving, it was boiling hot all week and my garden is a desert but should live. x

dream in colour

Anyone familiar with Umbrella Print's fabric will know that Carly and I live, breathe and dream in colour! We spend too much of our time in the studio talking about, mixing up, dreaming up and mucking around with colour combinations and generally being colour NERDS.

My passion for colour merges with my love of words (and meanings) thus early on we both decided to name our colours with some thought for our own memories and interests. We have been known to introduce a new colour into our range not because it coordinates or because its popular but because we just love the name (not terribly wise as a business strategy but heaps of fun).

So if you love colour as much as we do then I hope you enjoy us banging on about it a bit more in the near future. Umbrella Prints will be bringing out a range of pure colour fabrics next year based on our current range of patterned fabric colours and just for those who can't get enough saturated colour love.

Our current range includes kimono red, sumi black, starfruit, seaglass, olive, lily white, momo peach, storm boy blue, lilac wine, turtledove, pink moon, bambi, nut brown (NEW), persimmon, silky oak, smoky black (NEW) and lady grey (NEW).

We would love to know your thoughts on which of these colours you would like to see more of in the form of block coloured fabric especially over here where Carly has listed them all.........or maybe you would just like to say hi x

purple rain

Jacaranda's kill me!; a combination of red eyes and sneezes but a colour so beautiful and irresistable carpets of blossoms covering my front garden like purple snow- I can do nothing but take a whole heap of hayfever tablets and sit under my tree for hours breathing in that purple.

3 favourites

Three of my favourite photos from this week- these all make me smile.

1) We all liked the weeny spider in the hakea flower which reminded us of the mini snail discovered back in March.

2) G in the Nest Studio window having a laugh

3) a sneek peak of a few of our new colours on organic hemp/cotton

FanFlower Friday

Friday is posting day for Umbrella Prints and also the only day without children running around so there is quite a bit of self inflicted pressure to do and achieve whilst we can!

An unexpected spike in Aussie orders for our fabric printed in FanFlower this week has left us running around like headless chooks trying to organise another print run before Sydney. We only have a little of the olive left. Someone nice must have written something about our fabric somewhere but we don't know who - so whoever you are thankyou!!!x!

Carly and I spent the rest of the day taking photos for a number of different postcards we are printing soon. Initially we had mixed results but the four images we finally chose we both love and feel they are representative of what we do and what we would like to do. So overall it was a good and productive Friday.

Hope you have a great weekend :-)

Mr Dean Manning

I lived a few doors down in Sydney, he was a friend of my sister's , we both liked the bookshop, his house was the cutest with little paintings on wood, circus, hawaiian lady, flower, text, tiny, guitar, funny. I love his paintings so!